NYReaders - U.S. social media company Meta Platforms (META), the tech titan behind Facebook and Instagram, recorded a drastic increase in revenues and net profit in the fourth quarter and full-year of 2023, which lifted its share prices on Thursday.
Its revenues in 2023 jumped 16% to US$134.90 billion from $116.61 billion in the previous year, while revenues in the fourth quarter surged 25% to $40.11 billion from $32.16 billion in the corresponding quarter of 2022.
It recorded a net profit of $49.1 billion, surging 69% from $23.2 billion in 2022.
On Thursday, META's stock closed up 1.19 percent or 4.64 points at $394.78.
"We had a good quarter as our community and business continue to grow," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "We've made a lot of progress on our vision for advancing AI and the metaverse."
Meta's board of directors declared a cash dividend of $0.50 per share of our outstanding common stock (including both Class A common stock and Class B common stock), payable on March 26, 2024, to stockholders of record as of the close of business on Feb. 22, 2024.
“We intend to pay a cash dividend on a quarterly basis going forward, subject to market conditions and approval by our board of directors,” he said.
Mark Zuckerberg attributed the increase to the restructuring of the company.
“Beginning in 2022, we initiated several measures to pursue greater efficiency and to realign our business and strategic priorities. As of December 31, 2023, we have completed the data center initiatives and the employee layoffs, and substantially completed the facilities consolidation initiatives,” he said.
Outlook
The company said it expects first-quarter 2024 total revenue to be in the range of $34.5-37 billion. Its guidance assumes foreign currency is neutral to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates.
It expects full-year 2024 total expenses to be in the range of $94-99 billion, unchanged from our prior outlook. The company continues to expect a few factors to be drivers of total expense growth in 2024:
- First, higher infrastructure-related costs this year. Given its increased capital investments in recent years, the company expects depreciation expenses in 2024 to increase by a larger amount than in 2023. It also expects to incur higher operating costs from running a larger infrastructure footprint.
- Second, the company anticipates growth in payroll expenses as it works down its current hiring underrun and adds incremental talent to support priority areas in 2024, which would further shift its workforce composition toward higher-cost technical roles.
- Finally, as for Reality Labs, it expects operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to its ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and its investments to further scale the ecosystem.
The company expects its full-year 2024 capital expenditures to be in the range of $30-37 billion, a $2 billion increase of the high end of our prior range.
The growth will be driven by investments in servers, including both AI and non-AI hardware, and data centers as we ramp up construction on sites with our previously announced new data center architecture. Our updated outlook reflects our evolving understanding of our artificial intelligence (AI) capacity demands as we anticipate what we may need for the next generations of foundational research and product development, the company said in a statement.
